creating new skin

[bsmyth]

What's the best way to start going about making a brand new skin for WebHelp that looks substantially different from anything that's already available in the MadCap library?

I want to make wholesale changes to an existing template, or create one entirely from scratch, in order to create online help that is branded with our company's colors, logo, icons, etc.

Thanks!

[SteveS]

I find the modify an existing skin to be the best approach - make sure you make a backup before you start, and at significant milestones along the way!

The good thing about the modify approach is you are starting with something that works, and you can check your modifcations each time.

HTH

[NorthEast]

What's the best way to start going about making a brand new skin for WebHelp that looks substantially different from anything that's already available in the MadCap library?

I want to make wholesale changes to an existing template, or create one entirely from scratch, in order to create online help that is branded with our company's colors, logo, icons, etc.

Whilst you can change the colour schemes and icons, I would hesitate to say you can produce something that's substantially different; the layout of the WebHelp frames and accordions are not very flexible. You can certainly produce something nicer than the Flare default skins though, which are quite poor.

You can only modify an existing skin template; when you create a new skin, it's based on an existing file.

Probably the largest part of the job will be designing the icons; you'll need to produce 3 versions of each icon for normal, hover, select.
To see the icon files in an existing WebHelp output, look in the output Data\SkinName folder.

For the frame and accordion backgrounds, you can either pick a colour scheme or use images.

[bsmyth]

Thanks for the replies!

[Madcap Guru]

Creating new images would be the most dramtic changes, In a previous Knowledge base, we had actually changed the accordian buttons to images instead of just lables, you can do an awful lot in the skin